The Online World & the Robots it Comes With
Michelle Waters
Today, our number one resources as humans is the internet. It provides us with limitless possibilities to search and discover our world around us in many capacities. The digital world we live in provides us with resources so critical to us, yet often taken for granted at the same time. One of the most popular avenues of the internet is social media, but are we aware of what we are interacting with on daily basis? The reality is that unfortunately the internet, in particular social media, is teaming with automated robots acting as real users. These robots, or bots, rapidly generate and share content at rates so high it is humanely impossible to match. Thus, our feeds become saturated with false narrative, dead-end links, and overall unreliable content that we may not even recognize as a threat. The most alarming part is that these robots go largely unnoticed to the unsuspecting eye – something I would venture to chalk up to as blissful ignorance of the internet consumer. As a society, it is time we educate ourselves to recognize these robots and learn what we can trust as active internet users.
What are these bots and is it important that we learn how to identify them? One author defines them in his article as “algorithmically-controlled accounts that emulate the activity of humans but operate at much higher pace (e.g., automatically producing content or engaging in social interactions), while successfully keeping their robotic identity undisclosed.”
Where did they come from? Are they causing harm? Are they something we should be worried about? Varied reports say Canadians between the ages 18 and 36 spend between 24 to 34 hours per week on the internet. If this is where we allocate such a large chunk of our time, perhaps it is time to look a little deeper into who, or what, we are interacting with daily and what kind of implications this comes with. A public talk at Simon Fraser University by Jevin West on “Calling Bullshit on Fake News,” detailed the threat that comes along with fake news and the power that robots have to circulate these false articles. Ultimately, this leaves us the responsibility to look at our news feeds with a critical eye and take all presented information with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, it takes a greater effort to recognize the pervasive news. West stressed that nowadays, everyone is looking for the next jaw dropping news story, leaving us with the reality that the unvarnished truth is no longer good enough for consumers. This leads writers to twist stories to make them more interesting and attract readers, creating a layer of fabrication in the majority of articles. West left us with a simple, yet provoking statement: “think more, share less.” It’s important to know what type of news you are helping spread.
These bots are used to target information at specific groups of people, and often used to gain traction for different topics as well as to sell items to consumers. Further, they can completely change your feed without you noticing and go as far as to alter political discourse. Regarding the question of if we need to learn to identify these accounts, the short answer is yes. In fact, it is very important that we are more diligent in understanding how to identify a bot account from a human account.
A study was done by the Pew Research Center outlines their potential impact. They took 500 of the most active suspected bot accounts and compared them to 500 of the most active human accounts on Twitter and this is what they found:
Of all the tweeted links to popular websites, 66% are shared by accounts with characteristics common among automated bots rather than human users
89% of tweeted links to popular aggregation sites that compile stories from around the web are also posted by bots
22% of tweeted links to popular news and current events are tweeted by bots compared to the 6% tweeted from the most active human accounts.
At the end of the day, bots are responsible for the circulation of the majority of news stories, content, and spam that saturates your feed and drowns out the content produced by the people you intended to follow. Read more about the Pew Study here.
This shows that these algorithms are programmed to ensure that certain stories and topics are circulating at a higher rate than others. One article summarizes what these bots are capable of, most of which comes down to automatically circulating, replying to, and promoting certain phrases, hashtags, and keywords. As well as, automatically following people linked to these phrases and keywords as well as anyone who follows them directly. They can search Google for news articles based on specific criteria and post them or link them in automatic replies. Thus, having an overwhelming presence on your newsfeed of stories whether you want them or not. This has become a highly debated topic when it comes to political campaigns, as it has become all too easy to create an image and idea around a prospective leader when you can do so using social bots and fake accounts.
Like anything, automated robots can have both positive and negative effects on the way things are communicated online. There’s a wide array of different kinds of bots circulating the internet, most of which get named for being malicious. As Alexis Lowe says, “bots run automated tasks, typically at a much higher rate than humans could.” These bots take the shape of social bots, click bots, spam bots, spy bots and more and are often considered to be malicious as they “can impact website performance, skew data and ad views, compromise online account security, and infect at risk computers with malware viruses.” The reported negative effects outweigh the positive, however, its important to note the brighter side of bots. They take over the mundane repetitive tasks and do them faster than any human could. They are able to provide real time updates for current events and keep the public in the know. They have also improved certain aspects of customer service experience with more timely responses to certain inquiries. The reality of the matter is, these bots are not going away. If anything, I think they will become more and more prevalent in certain sectors of the internet.
Recently, a Pew Study explains that Twitter has made an effort to start to eliminate these social bot accounts and have deleted approximately 70 million accounts to date this year. The fact that just one platform deleted 70 million accounts speaks volumes to just how many are roaming our internet and why we should seek to be able to identify them.
Here are three simple tips as originally outlined by Straith Schreder to help identify a bot account:
Online bots typically post a lot, one of the easiest things to check is their recent twitter activity. They can post up to thousands of times per day, frequencies so high humans are physically incapable of competing with them.
They are almost always anonymous accounts. An easy check is to see if there is an actual name and/or profile picture linked to the user profile.
the typical tweet from a bot is a retweet and quoted links instead of original posts.
Another article by Will Knight further suggests looking at the syntax and semantics of the messages they are spreading. Are they formulaic or repetitive? Are they preaching one specific topic over and over again? Becoming familiar with the tell-tale signs of a bot inform us of what we should be looking for.
At the end of the day, these bots will stay in circulation and continue to increase in number. Perhaps in the future we will find new ways to prevent them from skewing important data and altering statistics. One of the first solutions would be to increase awareness and education of the general population on how to recognize and detect bot activity. It is important that we know where and who our information is coming from and to what level of credibility we should hold it too. Too often, poor information is put in front of the eyes of those who are easily convinced, and it is circulated as a result. It is then spread like wildfire with the assistance of the social bots that have become a large presence in our media. It is our responsibility to educate ourselves, and future generations to become responsible digital citizens in order to reduce this dangerous cycle.
Work Cited
http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/04/09/bots-in-the-twittersphere/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.08134.pdf
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-642-13739-6_25.pdf
https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/blog/post/social-bots-everything-you-need-to-know/
https://www.scraawl.com/product/2018/08/07/the-bright-side-of-bots/
https://blog.mozilla.org/internetcitizen/2018/01/08/irl-how-to-spot-a-bot/
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611655/how-to-tell-if-youre-talking-to-a-bot/